CDI Benefits on costs and sizing

  • Containers are an abstraction to the OS which makes their compute usually lighter.
  • The containers are created and can be destroyed to at logoff or by a timer so save on costs.
  • Workloads can easily be hosted on prem, in the cloud or hybrid for cost allocation.
With Kasm you can manually destroy the container or a timer will destroy once it reaches the timeout.

Right-sizing

In VDI we can chose from multi-session or single-session OS. Scaling up or out depends on where we build the VDI (Cloud vs On prem).

Multi-Session VDI

For an on prem multi-session VDI we can spin up 6 “beefy” servers to spread the load since we paid for the hardware. We don’t pay for compute/hour so it is not required to constantly monitor or scale down since all the servers can be always on and capacity is overprovisioned to cover the max user count. For cloud this will be costly.

Distributing load for 8 users

For cost savings a multi-session VDI in the cloud needs a different approach which is to scale up as demand requires. Scale sets can be configured so you can boot up the next server before it is needed. For example, in the diagram shown below server 1 is at capacity and server 2 is at ~60%, we can use this metric to start up server 3.

Single-Session VDI (Desktop)

For single-session we need to know the use case to be able to determine how many CPUs, RAM, Disk and if GPUs are needed. Spikes can sometime suffer when not a lot of testing is done in the beginning. In the cloud you want to keep machines to concurrent sessions as close as possible to not have a large number of machines turned on without sessions. If you have an event that causes more people to login to the VDI than your average concurrency then when the user clicks the VDI to launch they will have to wait for the OS to boot which can be greater than a minute. I don’t recommend building a VDI without proper use case analysis because this might lead to overprovisioning and wasted resources. In the cloud this is also costly.

Below are some real life examples of VDI cost savings by scaling down on weekends and right sizing the VM size.

Turn off machines during the weekend if not in use.
Right Sizing the VM size for almost 50% savings.

In the next page we will cover the user experience and trends with VDI teams.

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